Problem background reported by Michael Rush: I use subversion with my current project, using the svn+ssh protocol. The router I'm behind times out stale connections after some period of time (let's say 60 minutes). This was causing me problems using ssh from the command line (i.e. outside IDEA), but I was able to fix it by adding a ServerAliveInterval to my ssh config (see http://www.kehlet.cx/articles/129.html) However, since IDEA doesn't use the system ssh, but instead uses a java version it didn't fix the problem there. Here's what happens: The first time I do an svn operation after opening the IDE, things work fine. If I do another operation after a long period of time, the whole IDE hangs. For example, if doing a commit, it will hang with the commit window open, stuck on the "creating commit packets" step. It will eventually complete (cancelling doesn't work), but it takes about 10 minutes. It gives me an excuse to go read Slashdot, but it's kind of a waste of time. Subsequent svn operations work fine unless I wait a long period of time. So, it seems that an ssh connection is established that eventually gets closed by the router, but the svn/ssh client thinks it's still open. For some reason the timeout as it tries to perform the svn operation is excessively long. If that timeout could be reduced to something more like a minute (or configurable?) things would be better. Or, perhaps the ssh client could implement the ServerAliveInterval like I configured for my cli client.